"How Does a Hungarian Jew Get to Make an Appeal for Austria?" Democratic Intellectual Imports of a Germanophone Journalist in Wartime Shanghai

Between 1939 and 1946, Ladislaus (László) Frank (1890-1965) was a key figure in Shanghai’s German-speaking emigrant press and left-wing democratic organizing. Having rubbed shoulders with Weimar-era liberals in Berlin and exposed the Austrofascist state’s corruption, the ex-Viennese journalist and political exile of the Hungarian Soviet Republic was arrested in 1938 by the Gestapo. Soon after finding asylum from Nazi persecution in Japanese-occupied China, the stateless Jewish refugee intellectual dived deep into the building of a Germanophone yet universalistic and democratic cultural space. As founder and editor-in-chief of Shanghai’s leading Central European exile newspapers, Frank didn’t shy away from confronting the powerful, be they the representatives of the Axis, the wealthy colonial establishment’s patronizing philanthropic practices, or the victorious Allies’ deprioritizing of postwar refugee repatriation. After 1945, he demanded agency for his colleagues and the denazification of his compatriots by establishing respective “antifascist” associations for emigrant writers and Hungarian expatriates. His internationalism expanded further when he marched along with Chinese students protesting the violence of the liberating U.S. troops and the corruption of the Nationalist government, a broadened political horizon he carried back to Cold War East-Central Europe. This paper argues that despite the existential insecurities and cultural uprooting, exile also offered a professional opportunity for seasoned émigrés like Ladislaus Frank. Ironically, Shanghai’s colonial environment, where sovereignty was divided and continuously contested, the capitalistic economic conditions, and the general unfamiliarity with the culture of his homeland enabled Frank to exhibit his Central European social democratic values. His newspapers and professional organizations represented much of the Shanghai Jewish refugees’ alternative, pre-, and anti-Nazi Germanophone intellectual traditions in East Asia.